ReportNet reports as portlets?

[stacybost]

Is there a way to package a ReportNet report as a portlet, and deploy to Websphere Portal Server (5.1)?

We want to display a report within a portlet, inside our company portal.

I'm afraid I'm not a Java developer and we haven't yet used SDK.

Thanks for any information.

Stacy

[MFGF]

If you have Cognos 8, this is quite easy, as Cognos Connection now conforms to the WSRP standard and can share portlets with Websphere and other WSRP compliant portals: all you would need to do would be to get hold of the Cognos Viewer portlet via the C8 web service.

If you have ReportNet, then things are rather more difficult.  As I see it, you have 2 options:

1) Add a portlet (iFrame) to Websphere which points at the URL of your report in ReportNet - this would still require a login to be passed through, though, so the portlet would probably take you to the login page before displaying the report.  Also the rendered output may not be a very good fit within the frame, so you'd probably get both vertical and horizontal scrollbars.

2) Code a custom portlet which uses the ReportNet SDK to run the report and return the results, rendering them within your custom portlet window. You could also take care of the login mechanism within your code, passing your websphere login through if applicable.  If you're in charge of coding the rendering, then there's less chance of ending up with scrollbars too.

From your message, I'm guessing the first option would be the way you'd want to go here...

Best regards,

MF.

[stacybost]

Thanks so much MF.

Unfortunately, the first option is not an option.  This is what we have done in the past, and it's how we open ReportNet within our portal.  However, we want to put this report on the home page of our portal, and there are links to other applications on this page that open in iFrames. The way our portal is implemented, it causes problems to have two aps open in two iFrames.  (this per our Web Dev group, I'm in DW/BI and that is not my area of expertise!)

Looks like we may have to give the customer another short-term solution (opening the report in another window, or in a static frame at the bottom of the browser window, or putting the report on it's own portal page and setting that page as the default) until we can implement option 2 or upgrade.

I was hoping that there might be a simple way to create a portlet.  Unfortunately, I didn't see a "Package as Portlet" option in the file menu!  ;)

Do you know....

There is a .war file included out of the box with ReportNet.  What does this do? 

How lengthy is the process for creating a custom portlet?  We haven't used the SDK, do you think this is something one our web developers could pick up pretty quickly? (more quickly than I could pick up Java, I'm sure)

And, do you happen to know how similar the SDK is between CRN and C8?  We may pull in a contractor to do this custom portlet.  Would it be worth it to have them also train one of our web developers, or would this learning be obsolete when we upgrade to C8?

Thanks again!

Stacy

[MFGF]

Hi Stacy,

Sorry I couldn't be of more help!

How lengthy is the process to code a portlet?  I guess it depends on which development language you use, and how familiar you are with writing web-based applications.  If you have some experience of these already, then the development process should not take too long.  If you already have web developers, I'm sure they could pick up the SDK and run with it quite easily - they would just need to know what objects and methods to call within ReportNet, and these are documented in the Developers Guide.  If you're developing in a java environment, then the WSDL can be consumed via Axis - if your developers have experience of this already, they should not have too many problems.

The SDK has some subtle changes from ReportNet to Cognos 8, but mostly Cognos have kept things the same.  I'd say once a developer knows the CRN SDK, it would be fairly easy to transfer over to the C8 SDK, so I don't think the learning would become obsolete.

Just my opinions, for what they're worth.

Best regards,

MF.

[FatCat]

On this topic I would like to call the portlets that come bundled with C8.

I am running a WSRP compliant portal but it is NOT supported by Cognos.

What are the steps to configure c8 to set up the WSRP iviews and then call them from my portal?

Thoughts???

I have found detailed information to do it with IBM Portal, PlumTree and SAP as they are supported.
I am looking for a general connection to the WSRP portlets from a WSRP compliant portal

Thanks